For a quarter-century, the economic engine of the digital world relied on a predictable transaction: Users searched, links appeared and traffic flowed.
That foundational contract was declared effectively dead this week at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France.
As the global advertising elite gathered aboard superyachts and inside beachfront villas, the conversation shifted from how to win human attention to a much more urgent, existential question: How do you influence an A.I. model?
The concern carries major financial and systemic implications far beyond Madison Avenue: Fortune 500 corporations facing sudden commercial invisibility as chatbot answers bypass multibillion-dollar digital marketing funnels; publishers and creators watching A.I. models starve them of referral traffic; and political strategists being left blind about their donors.
“These are tectonic shifts,” said Shiv Singh, a former C.M.O. and marketing leader for brands like Pepsi, Expedia and LendingTree who runs the industry organization AI Trailblazers. “The way discoverability is changing is like an earthquake nobody expected.”
Google now serves up A.I.-generated summaries before search results. And many consumers are getting their information directly from chatbots. But compared with traditional search, the way large language models source and summarize content is far less predictable or consistent. That has some marketers feeling less in control and more worried about how the models explain, ignore or incorrectly characterize them.
One answer is to buy ads directly from A.I. platforms. OpenAI used the week in Cannes to pitch advertisers on placing ads within ChatGPT, through which the company reportedly expected to earn $100 million annually by 2030. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
Another approach is to try to show up in A.I. content organically. What can brands do to make sure ChatGPT and Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, tell users good things about them? Or to show up in lists of recommendations?
Brands have experimented with making the information easier for A.I. agents to read, including by adding more details about products and F.A.Q.s to their websites.
Established tech brands and start-ups alike are creating other solutions. At Cannes, Google showcased the ads in its A.I. summaries of search results. And Adobe, which paid $1.9 billion this year to buy the S.E.O. company Semrush, promoted a product powered by its technology for making brands more visible to A.I. models. At a “Semrush Villa,” Cannes attendees could see a “visibility report” on how a brand appeared to the models, how they compared with rivals and strategies for noticing and addressing content gaps.
A growing class of A.I. start-ups that aims to help marketers with A.I. visibility set up along the beach and in rented yachts during the festival. IV.AI, docked on “Yacht Row,” monitors external A.I. search outputs and suggests language that may improve citations. Jasper, which had one of the many smaller tents along the beach, helps brands generate content optimized for A.I. systems.
And Profound, which tracks the volume of mentions to show how A.I.-generated answers describe and cite brands across ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini, made its Cannes debut after reaching unicorn status this year when it raised a $96 million round of funding that valued the 2-year-old start-up at $1 billion.
James Cadwallader, a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Profound, said his team had already had nearly 300 meetings by Thursday morning. “It’s been a wild, wild week,” he said.
Many marketers said they were still experimenting with different approaches and solutions.
“It’s not like best practices exist right now,” said Kim Storin, the C.M.O. of Zoom, who is part of a group of C.M.O.s who meet monthly to talk about A.I.-related issues. “We’re creating the best practice ourselves.”
Some brands have concluded they need two versions of some content — one for the machines, one for the humans — said Anda Gansca, a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Knotch, a content marketing start-up.
She was in Cannes to promote her company’s new “agentic content engine,” which helped brands like Zillow and Ally Financial develop a second version of their existing content meant to be more visible and readable to machines.
The idea came after Knotch noticed some sites that were optimizing for A.I. readability were hurting their appeal to humans.
“We have to understand that the more LLMs change us as humans, and the more work they do for us, the more we’re going to want a different experience than agent-first content,” she said, referring to large language models. “We’re looking for an experience that’s multimodal and visual and relevant and personalized.”
A WORD FROM ANDREW
Good morning. Andrew here. You might have been seeing a lot of influencers and others in your feed at Cannes, France, this week for the world‘s largest advertising conference. I just got back from there myself. Underneath it all, there is an existential dread about how A.I. is going to change the relationship that businesses, politicians and creatives have with their customers. We asked Marty Swant, a DealBook contributor, to go deep on this topic this morning. We’ve also been thinking about the implications of prediction markets, and Sarah Kessler has a fascinating interview with Al Roth, a Nobel winning economist who studies market design, about how to think through the big questions. And please make sure to take this week’s quiz about the markets.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Market volatility jolted A.I. bellwethers. Tech stocks tumbled on Friday as investors grappled with high interest rates and corporate customers rethinking their A.I. spending. Increasing input prices are also at play. Apple said on Thursday that it would raise prices on Macs and iPads because costs for memory and storage chips were increasing amid A.I. demand. OpenAI is leaning toward holding off on its I.P.O. until next year.
Mamdani allies swept congressional primary elections. Wall Street and corporate leaders are reckoning with the stunning show of influence, which opens the door to a new generation of democratic socialist lawmakers. Questions loom about the future of New York City’s economy, taxes on corporations and the rich, and the potential for a wider national movement.
Oil prices returned to prewar levels. That’s despite an attack on a container ship on Thursday in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping route for crude oil. President Trump said on Friday that the strike had violated the cease-fire between the U.S. and Iran. The U.S. military hit Iranian missile and drone sites on Friday night in retaliation for Thursday’s attack.
The moral economics of prediction markets
Prediction markets hit a momentum milestone this week: Meta, which often copies ideas that gain traction, is experimenting with an app that is similar to Kalshi or Polymarket, The Times reported on Tuesday.
But as the platforms, which allow people to place bets on topics as varied as politics and sports, have caught on, they have also drawn controversy. Reports of insider trading by employees, military officials and politicians have proliferated. And the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates prediction markets, said on Tuesday it was suing Kentucky after the state became the latest of many to assert that prediction apps were illegal gambling platforms that should be regulated by their gambling authorities.
The economist Al Roth, a professor at Stanford University, shared a 2012 Nobel Prize for his work in market design and matching theory. He spoke with Sarah Kessler about his latest book, “Moral Economics,” which offers a framework for understanding controversial markets, and how t applies to prediction markets. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Your book explores what you call repugnant markets — meaning some people don’t think they should exist — like prostitution, surrogacy and drugs. How do prediction markets fit in?
When I think about repugnance and prediction markets, I think back to when Darpa proposed a policy prediction market that became characterized as a terrorist prediction market, and people really objected to that.
That objection was sort of misplaced. It would be great if terrorists who were planning attacks wanted to tip their hand by betting on them in advance. But also, if you were a terrorist who knew about the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and you wanted to make money, you wouldn’t bet on a prediction market. You would short United Airlines and American Airlines.
What do you make of all the reports of insider trading on prediction markets?
The reason we forbid insider trading in securities markets is to give people confidence in them. Securities markets have an important financial function that is threatened by insider trading, and I’m not sure that prediction markets necessarily do.
What worries me about the current state of prediction markets and Washington insiders is more the blurring of private and public functions. I don’t think that being an associate of the president should allow you to bet on a Truth Social post by President Trump. That is very bad public policy, but not necessarily an indictment of prediction markets per se.
Do you have an opinion on whether prediction markets should be regulated by the C.F.T.C. or state gambling authorities?
Futures markets, like securities markets in general, play other roles in society. If you’re a farmer who’s growing wheat, a futures market allows you to sell your wheat before you’ve planted it, which allows you to buy the fertilizer and make plans. That’s one role for federal regulators.
The contract has a delivery date. It says on a certain day a freight car is going to deliver potatoes to me. If, for example, someone tried to corner the potato market by reserving all the freight cars so that you wouldn’t be able to deliver on the contract, the regulator could intervene.
With prediction markets, there’s nothing that has to be delivered. It’s just that someone has to adjudicate whether the bet was a yes or a no. That requires maybe some kind of regulation, but that seems more like a customer relations thing.
Is there anything that you would change about the design of prediction markets?
I have some ideas about what we can do about gambling and addiction. An appropriate regulator or consumer protection agency could start to require that apps allow you to put a limit on your betting.
Before the game starts, you can say to the app: When I’ve lost a hundred dollars, shut down. Don’t let me make any more bets.
And that might help some people just the way bartenders are supposed to stop serving you if you’ve had too much to drink.
Quiz: 100-year gains
This question comes from a recent article in The Times. Click on an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)
In the last 100 years, a tiny group of companies has accounted for almost all of the profits for investors in the stock market, according to the latest update to a long-running study by Hendrik Bessembinder, a finance professor at Arizona State University. Of the top 10 companies over the last century, how many were tech companies?
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